DOCSLIB.ORG

Harmony: Open Consensus for 10B People

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Harmony: Open Consensus for 10B People Harmony: Open Consensus for 10B People Harmony builds an open marketplace at Google-scale for the decentralized economy. This ​ ​ ​ project aims to provide a consensus protocol over the open Internet at 10 million transactions ​ ​ ​ ​ per second with 100-millisecond latency and at most 0.1% fee. Harmony’s goal is to be 1,000+ times faster and cheaper than Bitcoin and Ethereum. We are ​ ​ rebuilding the decentralized economy with 10x innovations in all components: transport ​ network (Google’s UDP, Bloom tables, 5G mobile), consensus protocol (Byzantine ​ ​ ​ ​ committees, acyclic graphs, monopolist fees), and system tooling (unikernels, multi-core in ​ ​ ​ Rust, zero-copy streaming). We believe communication is the key to the future of humans and machines to create in ​ ​ harmony. As the gateway for microtransactions or online business, our fee must be at most ​ ​ ​ 0.1% of the transaction value to support new marketplaces of metered content or fractional work. As the infrastructure for the world’s data firehose, our bandwidth must scale to 10M tx/sec to ​ ​ support data from supply chain IoT devices or energy grids. Yet, all of the above must settle agreements within 100 milliseconds to support instant reactions for autonomous robots or ​ ​ on-chain quotes in exchanges. We employ technical innovations that are already proven in research and implementation. For ​ ​ example, Google’s UDP currently powers 35% of its traffic (or 7% of the Internet) with 50% ​ ​ latency improvement, OmniLedger Byzantine protocol benchmarks to 13,000 tx/sec and 1.5 ​ ​ sec latency with 1,800 hosts, while unikernels in Rust archives 10M concurrent connections on ​ ​ a standard 96-core machine on Amazon Cloud. The rest of this document describes our technical architecture and company roadmap. Sign up for Harmony! See our talk (simple-rules.com/talk) or our GitHub for the compiler ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ prototype. Our extended team (part time) consists of four Ph.D.s, 3 Ex-Google, 2 Ex-Apple, ​ ​ ​ graduates from Berkeley, CMU, Waterloo, Penn and Harvard. About: Stephen Tse coded in OCaml for 15+ years and graduated with a doctoral degree from ​ ​ the University of Pennsylvania on security protocols and compiler verification. He was a ​ ​​ researcher at Microsoft Research, a senior infrastructure engineer at Google, and a principal engineer on search ranking at Apple. He founded the mobile search Spotsetter, a startup Apple ​ ​ ​ later acquired. He may be reached at [email protected]. ​ ​ ​ Harmony: 为百亿人打造的开放式去中心化共识协议 让我们建立一个Google数据级别的开放市场平台，成为去中心化经济系统的顶梁柱。 Harmony的目标是，在开放的互联网上，提供一个去中心化的共识协议，做到每秒处理 ​ ​ ​ 千万条交易和数据，保证100毫秒左右的延迟，同时让每笔交易的手续费低于0.1%。 Harmony会做到比世界上最领先的区块链网络还要快1000倍，便宜1000倍，比如和 Bitcoin和Ethereum比起来。我们会通过10倍的技术创新，重构去中心化的经济体系下的 所有层面：传输层（Google的特制UDP协议， 布隆表格，以及5G移动网络），共识协议 层（拜占庭委员会机制，无环图，垄断费），以及系统工具（Rust下Unikernel单内核并 行计算，和零拷贝数据流)。 我们相信在未来，通信与交互 是人与机器融洽相处的关键。和谐与一致，即是Harmony ​ ​ 的内在含义 。要成为一个支持微交易的电子商务网关平台，我们收取的交易费必须低于 ​ ​ 0.1%，才足够支持（大数据时代）市场下簇生的新兴交易模式，比如对信息内容的量化 ，以及工作内容的微分。作为基础设施，我们必须像是水电网络一样，为全世界的数据提 ​ ​ ​ ​ 供稳定可靠的通道。正因为如此，我们的带宽必须能够扩展到至少每秒千万条交易的级 别。这样，我们才能够支持那些由供应链、物联网（IoT）、能源网生成的数据。在这基 础上，我们还要保障每条交易从握手达成，到被整个网络认证，必须在100毫秒内完成， 这样，我们才可以支持那些需要实时处理能力的应用，比如全自动机器人，交易所报价。 ​ ​ 在技术方面，我们只会采纳那些已通过考验的革命性技术。这些技术都已经历过长期大范 围的研究、开发、和测试。举例来说，Google的特制UDP协议，现在已经处理了Google 本身超过35%的流量。这相当于整个互联网7%的流量。从实际数据上看，这个协议至少 降低了用户50%的网络延迟。OmniLedger上的拜占庭协议，可以处理超过每秒13,000条 交易，在1800个主机下运转，只有1.5秒的网络延迟，Rust下单内核技术，则可以在只用 一个亚马逊云端96核的主机的情况下，并行同时处理一千万个网络连接。 Stephen Tse 谢镇滔 (微信 “tsestephen”) 自高中年代起，便一直着迷于编译器和 ​ ​ ​ 通信协议方面的研究。他曾反编译过 ICQ 和 X11 的通讯协议，并已用 OCaml 语 言编程长达十五余年。他博士毕业于宾夕法尼亚大学，专注于研究安全通讯协 ​ 议，以及编译器校验方面的技术 。 ​ ​ ​ Stephen 曾在微软研究院总部任职研究员，在Google总部任职高级软件工程师 ，负责基础架构方面的项目，并在苹果公司总部任职主任工程师，主导搜索排 序方面的工作。他曾创立 一个专注于移动搜索的公司 Spotsetter，并被苹果公 ​ 司收购。Stephen 还是一个前 Google 员工的硅谷创业者每周私人聚会的创办人和组织者（TGI-$ — ​ 大口喝酒，大谈机器学习和区块链 )。 ​ Architecture and Innovations 4 1. Transport Network 4 2. System Tooling 5 3. Consensus Protocols 6 Protocols and Optimizations 7 1. High-Performance Protocols 7 2. Principles for Scaling 9 3. Model for Attacks 9 Locations and AI 10 1. Location Oracles 10 2. Decentralized Maps 10 3. AI Data Marketplace 10 Contracts and Beyond 11 1. Formal Verification vs Hacks 11 2. Language-based Security 12 3. Fairness and Efficiency 13 Team and Collaborators 15 1. Passion and Team 15 2. Expertise and Collaborators 17 Milestones and Roadmap 19 1. Achievements and Milestones 19 2. Roadmap for Launch 19 Tokens and Sales 20 1. Token Model and Incentives 20 2. Planned Use of Proceeds 21 Questions and Answers 21 1. Frequently Asked Questions 21 2. Further readings 23 Appendix: Min Language for Contracts 24 Architecture and Innovations “ Bottlenecks were neither the protocol nor the infrastructure. The ​ bottlenecks were in the implementation of the protocol. ” ​ ​ ​ Bitcoin Unlimited at Stanford We argue that all aspects of a consensus protocol are critical for scaling beyond 1,000x. Our ​ ​ approach is to productionize research innovations to the scale that serves billions of people ​ ​ and devices. Currently most decentralized applications are limited to infrequent transfers of currencies or ​ ​ tokens. Harmony’s high performance will make many real-world decentralized applications ​ ​ ​ ​ practical. Later in this document, we will describe many use cases unique to Harmony, including location oracles, decentralized maps, and AI data marketplaces. ​ ​ ​ Let’s start with our technical differentiation. We seek and master innovations already proven in ​ practice. For Harmony, we focus on the following key components: transport network, ​ consensus protocol, and system tooling. Our team has extensive experience building systems at the largest scale in the top tech ​ ​ companies. We will also show a prototype of our own contract language and compiler in the later sections. 1. Transport Network As discussed in Advances in block propagation by Greg Maxwell, 12% of network bandwidth is ​ ​ consumed by synchronizing blocks among nodes. More critically, 2.5 round trips are needed to confirm transactions. Maxwell’s study concludes that relay engines and template deltas are ​ ​ ​ ​ important research directions to improve the propagation performance, which Harmony follows closely. We base our network stack on Google’s UDP, called QUIC, which accounts for 88% of Chrome ​ ​ traffic (35% Google’s traffic or 7% of Internet traffic). QUIC improves multiplexing over sessions ​ ​ and achieves zero round-trip latency. The multiplexing saturates the network when ​ ​ synchronizing multiple resources, hence drastically improving bandwidth. It also eliminates many session handshakes during connection setup, which are slow and computationally expensive. Furthermore, broadcasting without round trips makes data synchronization robust to network changes and unavailability. The research paper The QUIC Transport Protocol: Design and Internet-Scale Deployment [talk] ​ ​ ​ ​ covers many technical details and deployment insights for QUIC implementations. Another independent study Taking a Long Look at QUIC: An Approach for Rigorous Evaluation depicts ​ ​ ​ Google’s UDP as the future of the transport layer. An important technique we use for transaction propagations is Bloom tables in set reconciliation ​ ​ and coding. Like the template deltas for Bitcoin mentioned above, Bloom tables enable communication between shards in constant size O(1), rather than proportional to the total transaction size O(n). Graphene employs a similar approach, described in What's the ​ Difference? Efficient Set Reconciliation without Prior Context, to huge improvement. ​ Lastly, we design with 5G mobile network in mind, namely 1ms latency, 1M connections/km², and 10Gbps throughput, as described by Huawei 5G vision. This upcoming transport network ​ ​ supports 100B connections all over the world; their initial tests are already deployed in Japan and Europe. 2. System Tooling One principle guiding our work is to actively seek novel architecture and to use optimal ​ ​ ​ languages. ​ Bitcoin Unlimited recently argues the same point of an integrated approach and the quality of implementation. Its talk Measuring maximum sustained transaction throughput at Stanford ​ ​ emphasizes proper parallelization and eliminating locks through Bitcoin’s system design. The technical blog post Terabyte blocks for Bitcoin Cash also argues the importance of an ​ ​ optimal backend architecture. It claims the economic feasibility of 7M tx/sec at 10-min latency. More concretely, A roadmap for scaling Bitcoin Cash discusses many proposals for systems ​ ​ optimization: memory map, parallelization, and indexing unspent outputs. We take an extreme view on eliminating the bottlenecks in our protocol implementation. Our inspiration comes from Mosaic: Processing a trillion-edge graph on a single machine (talk), ​ ​ ​ ​ which achieves 59x speedup on the most challenging distributed benchmarks, including PageRank and community detections. Its novel innovation is to use Hilbert-ordered tiling ​ scheme for locality, managing to process graphs with 1 billion nodes and 1 trillion nodes on a ​ single host. Mosaic runs its benchmarks on standard machines with 244 cores and 850K IOPS, which are readily available on Amazon cloud at a low cost. The most severe overheads of parallel processing are locks and garbage collections. Typically, ​ ​ ​ ​ the more processing cores in the machine, the more contention for the same resources, which are marked mutually exclusive using locks. Similarly, the more memory in the machine, the longer it takes to scan for free space among all data structures. We
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Mobile Smart Fundamentals Mma Members Edition June 2014
    MOBILE SMART FUNDAMENTALS MMA MEMBERS EDITION JUNE 2014 messaging . advertising . apps . mcommerce www.mmaglobal.com NEW YORK • LONDON • SINGAPORE • SÃO PAULO MOBILE MARKETING ASSOCIATION JUNE 2014 REPORT The Global Board Given our continuous march toward providing marketers the tools they need to successfully leverage mobile, it’s tempting to give you another week-by-week update on our DRUMBEAT. But, as busy as that’s been, I’d like to focus my introduction for this month’s Mobile Smart Fundamentals on the recent announcement we made regarding our Global Board. Our May 6th announcement that we would be welcoming the first CMO in the MMA’s history to take up the position of Global Chairperson was significant for many reasons, not least of which is the incredible insight and leadership that John Costello brings to the role. This was also one of our first steps to truly aligning the MMA to a new marketer-first mission. Subsequently, on June 25th, we were pleased to announce the introduction, re-election and continuation of committed leaders to the MMA’s Global Board (read full press release here). But perhaps most significantly of all, we welcomed a number of new Brand marketers and that list of Brands on the Global Board now includes The Coca-Cola Company, Colgate-Palmolive, Dunkin’ Brands, General Motors, Mondelez International, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Visa and Walmart. http://www.mmaglobal.com/about/board-of-directors/global To put this into context, the board now comprises 80% CEOs and Top 100 Marketers vs. three years ago where only 19% of the board comprised CEOs and a single marketer, with the majority being mid-level managers.
    [Show full text]
  • Purchase Intent Predicts Stock Performance
    Purchase Intent Predicts Stock Performance LikeFolio Purchase Intent Strategies Performance Report EDITION: APRIL 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIKEFOLIO OVERVIEW ........................................................................................................... 1 PURCHASE INTENT (PI) METRIC & SIGNAL CALCULATION .................................................... 2 Purchase Intent (PI) Metric Definition & Examples ........................................................................ 2 Purchase Intent Signal Calculation .................................................................................................. 3 TRADING STRATEGIES UTILIZING LIKEFOLIO PI SIGNAL ....................................................... 4 Earnings Trading Strategy ................................................................................................................ 5 Active Trading Strategies ................................................................................................................. 6 Portfolio Strategy – Top-8 Long vs Bottom-8 Short ..................................................................... 12 Combined Portfolio ......................................................................................................................... 13 SUMMARY .......................................................................................................................... 15 CONTACT INFORMATION .................................................................................................... 16 LEGAL DISCLAIMERS..........................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • View July 2014 Report
    MOBILE SMART FUNDAMENTALS MMA MEMBERS EDITION JULY 2014 messaging . advertising . apps . mcommerce www.mmaglobal.com NEW YORK • LONDON • SINGAPORE • SÃO PAULO MOBILE MARKETING ASSOCIATION JULY 2014 REPORT The Playbook Over the last few months we’ve been building a unique resource that will help our brand marketer members successfully develop and execute a mobile strategy, allowing them to deliver a consistent mobile brand experience on a global scale. Enter our Mobile Marketing Playbook (Press Release). Launched last week and created in partnership with global sporting goods giant, adidas, it aims to explain when, where and how companies can use mobile as core to their marketing efforts. Whilst we’ve seen some incredible work this year, as evidenced by the many great mobile campaigns submitted to our 2014 Smarties Awards Program (currently in pre-screening), one of the challenges marketers still face is how to make mobile an integral part of their mix. The Playbook takes marketers through the process of mobile strategy development from start to finish. It provides best practices around mobile executions, ways to leverage the myriad mobile vehicles, insights into mobile creative effectiveness and how companies can effectively measure and optimize mobile. To address the ever changing needs of and challenges faced by marketers, the Playbook will be regularly updated to reflect shifts in consumer behavior, mobile trends as they are introduced, and innovations that are continuously being developed through and with mobile. This will be accomplished in part by the annual addition of well over 500 case studies into our Case Study Hub, helping to define best practice and to serve as a source of inspiration to our marketer members Members can access the entire Playbook by logging in using your member login and password where directed.
    [Show full text]
  • M&A Transactions
    MOBILE SMART FUNDAMENTALS MMA MEMBERS EDITION SEPTEMBER 2013 messaging . advertising . apps . mcommerce www.mmaglobal.com NEW YORK • LONDON • SINGAPORE • SÃO PAULO MOBILE MARKETING ASSOCIATION SEPTEMBER 2013 REPORT Mobile is a Top Priority for Marketers On the main stage of SM2™ visionary business leaders shared their insights on the ever-evolving mobile landscape. Unveiled at the conference was a joint study issued by the MMA and Neustar, Inc. entitled, “Marketers Guide to Mobile and Data.” The research was gathered from a survey of 400 companies across the consumer product and service categories. Questions focused on how marketers perceive mobile, the impact achieved with mobile tactics, as well as the strategic advantage of data. The study revealed that a staggering 85 percent of marketers believe that mobile is a gateway to new markets and audiences. Additionally, 80 percent of respondents cited that mobile is not only transformational for their companies, but also strategic for their careers to stay on the cutting edge of emerging trends and technology. The survey identified that data offers significant value when paired with mobile as 61 percent of companies plan to invest more in data capabilities over the next year. After reviewing the insights and findings from the “Marketers Guide to Mobile and Data,” it is clear that we are experiencing a seismic shift in the industry when it comes to the attitudes and priorities of marketers embracing mobile. Only a few years ago, many brands were still asking “why mobile” but now senior executives realize that the future health of their businesses is linked to mobile’s role as a marketing vehicle.
    [Show full text]
  • Internet of Things Investment & Corporate Development Report
    smart Developing New Growth systems Opportunities And Businesses At The Intersection Of Smart Systems, design Services And The Internet Of Things Internet of Things Investment & Corporate Development Report May 2017 internet of things investment and internet of things investment and corporate development report corporate development report The light at the end of the 5G tunnel... Every new generation of wireless networks delivers faster speeds and more functionality fordevices. 1G brought us the very first cell phones, 2G let us text for the first time, 3G brought us online, and 4G brought us the speeds we enjoy today. But as more devices come online, 4G networks have just about reached their limit of what they’re capable of, at a time when connected devices are growing at an exponential rate. Now, we’re headed towards 5G, the next generation of wireless. It will be able to handle 1000x the traffic of today’s networks and up to 10x faster than 4G LTE. An HD movie will download in under a second… 5G will be the foundation for smart grids, virtual reality, autonomous driving, and every other category of the IoT. So what is 5G? Essentially, 5G will be a combination of technologies that improve the efficiency and security of networks. We believe this is still a long way from becoming a reality, but the foundation of this technology is already seeing plenty of action. The foundation includes: » Millimeter wave spectrum: This section of spectrum has never been used before for mobile devices, and opening it up means more bandwidth for everyone » Small Cell Networks: millimeter waves have a tougher time traveling through obstacles, and small cell networks solve this problem through a relay of base stations.
    [Show full text]
  • M&A Transactions
    MOBILE SMART FUNDAMENTALS MMA MEMBERS EDITION AUGUST 2014 messaging . advertising . apps . mcommerce www.mmaglobal.com NEW YORK • LONDON • SINGAPORE • SÃO PAULO MOBILE MARKETING ASSOCIATION AUGUST 2014 REPORT The Innovators As you’ll have seen from the release of this year’s Smarties™ Awards shortlist, we had an exceptional response to this year’s programs. With close to 100 campaigns from 30 countries, just for the Global program shortlist alone, interest in this year’s programs has grown dramatically. With programs in North America, EMEA, UK, Turkey, South Africa, APAC, India, Vietnam, LATAM, in addition to our anchor Global program, the Smarties Awards have truly become a global platform for recognizing those marketers who are blazing new trails and challenging the status quo. This year’s Global Gala & Ceremony will be held on October 1 in New York and will serve as a fitting finale to our SM2 Mobile Innovation Summit – which you can secure your seat for here. The Smarties Awards programs support the Industry and our members in two important ways. Being able to recognize and communicate globally that there is fierce competition in this space, is key to the MMA’s marketer first mission and to communicating mobile’s importance to a brands ongoing success. Connected to this is our ability to then share these submissions via our Case Study Hub, allowing members to search by mobile vehicle used, geographic markets served and industry vertical. This serves as an inspiration center as well as a creative and results driven benchmarking tool that our members can use to accelerate the success of their own mobile campaigns and strategy, again, essential to our marketer first mission.
    [Show full text]
  • Market Study Into Mobile App Stores
    Public Report Market study into mobile app stores The Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets Public Market study into mobile app stores Case no.: ACM/18/032693 / Date: 11 April, 2019 Table of contents Executive summary 3 Managementsamenvatting 9 1 Introduction 15 1.1 Reason for looking into mobile app stores 15 1.2 ACM’s perspective, public interests and the scope of this report 16 1.3 Methodology and structure of this report 17 2 The app-ecosystem 19 2.1 Online Platforms 19 2.2 The consumer 22 2.3 App providers 23 2.4 The app stores 26 2.5 Platform-ecosystems 30 2.6 Observations 38 3 Importance of the app stores 40 3.1 Bottleneck 40 3.2 Alternatives to apps 42 3.3 Alternatives to app stores 44 3.4 Alternative app-ecosystems 51 3.5 Bargaining Power 68 3.6 Future Developments 71 3.7 Observations 72 4 Conduct 74 4.1 Equal acCess to the end-user 74 4.2 In-app purchases 86 4.3 Transparency & liability 96 5 Public interests 101 5.1 Competitive markets 101 5.2 Safeguarding consumer interests 104 6 Findings and follow-up 106 6.1 Favouring own apps over apps from other providers 106 6.2 Unequal treatment of apps in general 107 6.3 Lack of transparency 107 6.4 Follow-up 108 Annex 1: Contacts (confidential) 109 2/109 The Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets Public Market study into mobile app stores Case no.: ACM/18/032693 / Date: 11 April, 2019 Executive summary For a Dutch version of this executive summary, see the next chapter.
    [Show full text]
  • ACM Market Study Into Mobile App Stores
    Public Report Market study into mobile app stores The Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets Public Market study into mobile app stores Case no.: ACM/18/032693 / Date: 11 April, 2019 Table of contents Executive summary 3 Managementsamenvatting 9 1 Introduction 15 1.1 Reason for looking into mobile app stores 15 1.2 ACM’s perspective, public interests and the scope of this report 16 1.3 Methodology and structure of this report 17 2 The app-ecosystem 19 2.1 Online Platforms 19 2.2 The consumer 22 2.3 App providers 23 2.4 The app stores 26 2.5 Platform-ecosystems 30 2.6 Observations 38 3 Importance of the app stores 40 3.1 Bottleneck 40 3.2 Alternatives to apps 42 3.3 Alternatives to app stores 44 3.4 Alternative app-ecosystems 51 3.5 Bargaining Power 68 3.6 Future Developments 71 3.7 Observations 72 4 Conduct 74 4.1 Equal access to the end-user 74 4.2 In-app purchases 86 4.3 Transparency & liability 96 5 Public interests 101 5.1 Competitive markets 101 5.2 Safeguarding consumer interests 104 6 Findings and follow-up 106 6.1 Favouring own apps over apps from other providers 106 6.2 Unequal treatment of apps in general 107 6.3 Lack of transparency 107 6.4 Follow-up 108 Annex 1: Contacts (confidential) 109 2/109 The Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets Public Market study into mobile app stores Case no.: ACM/18/032693 / Date: 11 April, 2019 Executive summary For a Dutch version of this executive summary, see the next chapter.
    [Show full text]
  • View October 2013 Report
    MOBILE SMART FUNDAMENTALS MMA MEMBERS EDITION OCTOBER 2013 messaging . advertising . apps . mcommerce www.mmaglobal.com NEW YORK • LONDON • SINGAPORE • SÃO PAULO MOBILE MARKETING ASSOCIATION OCTOBER 2013 REPORT Location: The Holy Grail of Marketing It was not long ago that mobile devices were considered a tool for basic communication. Fast-forward to today and now mobile has transformed into the ultimate marketing vehicle, threading content with context. Mobile’s power and potential to deliver campaigns at the right place and time revolutionizes marketing outreach. When a consumer walks by a store and receives an incentive, such as a coupon, prompting them to visit the location—that is incredibly valuable. What consumers crave are relevant messages and location- based ads not only enable tailored content but also the correct context. However, location is still in its infancy and it is a complex landscape for companies to navigate. With location capabilities developing, there is a critical need for guidelines as marketers look to harness the power of location-based marketing and advertising. Location data comes from a variety of sources, including Wi-Fi, cell towers, GPS, self-reporting, as well as a combination of methods. That is why the MMA Location Committee developed “The Location Terminology Guide—The Language of Location,” which outlines fundamental technologies, measurements and strategies across the location space. The document deep dives into three core categories, including: • Location Data and Signals reviews the technology
    [Show full text]
  • Grubhub Seamless Have Successfully Leveraged the Growing Use of Smartphones While Instacart Has Gained Popularity for Applying Crowd Sourcing to Grocery Deliveries
    The Bits and Bytes of Food: Study of Emerging Internet-based Food Businesses By Vishrut Mulay Bachelor of Engineering Pune University, 2005 0 F TE C HN X9LOG-Y1Mf SUBMITTED TO THE MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF JUN 18 E2014 MANAGEMENT IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF L IBRA RIES MASTER OF SCIENCE IN MANAGEMENT STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2014 © 2014 Vishrut Mulay. All Rights Reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature redacted Signature of Author: MIT Sloan School of Management May 09, 2014 Signature redacted., Certified By: Michael A. Cusumano U SMR Distinguished Professor of Management MIT Sloan School of Management Thesis Supervisor Accepted By: Signature redacted--- Michael A. Cusumano SMR Distinguished Professor of Management Program Director, M.S. in Management Studies Program MIT Sloan School of Management 1 [Page intentionally left blank] 2 The Bits and Bytes of Food: Study of Emerging Internet-based Food Businesses By Vishrut Mulay Submitted to the MIT Sloan School of Management on May 09, 2014 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Management Studies ABSTRACT As is the trend with a lot of industries, businesses in the food industry are also experiencing a shift towards the online world. This shift is driven by increasing convenience and popularity of doing business over the Internet and supported by rapid technological proliferation.
    [Show full text]
  • Dolata 2017 – Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft
    A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Dolata, Ulrich Working Paper Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft: Market concentration - competition - innovation strategies SOI Discussion Paper, No. 2017-01 Provided in Cooperation with: Institute for Social Sciences, Department of Organizational Sociology and Innovation Studies, University of Stuttgart Suggested Citation: Dolata, Ulrich (2017) : Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft: Market concentration - competition - innovation strategies, SOI Discussion Paper, No. 2017-01, Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Abteilung für Organisations- und Innovationssoziologie, Stuttgart This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/152249 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur
    [Show full text]
  • Platform Mergers and Antitrust
    PLATFORM MERGERS AND ANTITRUST TED VERSION 15 2021 JUNE 15 TED VERSION UPDA | GEOFFREY PARKER, GEORGIOS PETROPOULOS AND MARSHALL VAN ALSTYNE ISSUE 01/2021 ISSUE 01/2021 | Platform ecosystems rely on economies of scale, data-driven economies of scope, high quality algorithmic systems, and strong network effects that frequently promote winner-takes-most markets. Some platform firms have grown rapidly and their merger and acquisition strategies have been very important factors in their growth. Big platforms’ market dominance has generated competition WORKING PAPER PAPER WORKING concerns that are difficult to assess with current merger policy tools. We examine the acquisition strategies of the five major US firms—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft—since their inception. We discuss the main merger and acquisition theories of harm that can restrict market competition and reduce consumer welfare. To address competition concerns about acquisitions in big platform ecosystems we develop a four step proposal that incorporates: (1) a new ex-ante regulatory framework, (2) an update of the conditions under which the notification of mergers should be compulsory and the burden of proof should be reversed, (3) differential regulatory priorities in investigating horizontal versus vertical acquisitions, and (4) an update of competition enforcement tools to increase visibility into market data and trends. Geoffrey Parker: Dartmouth College Georgios Petropoulos: Bruegel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University Marshall Van Alstyne: Boston University We are very thankful to Aidai Kozubekova and Nicole Evans for their superb research assistance. The paper benefitted greatly from discussions with Erik Brynjolfsson, Luis Cabral, Avinash Collis, WORKING PAPER Maria Demertzis, Nestor Duch-Brown, Justus Haucap, Bertin Martens, Maciej Sobolewski, Tommaso Valletti and Guntram Wolff, as well as seminar participants at Bruegel.
    [Show full text]